Browse
Purpose
Notes
Early plans for the Adelphi make no provision for the site of a church, although Rowan has suggested that it was later intended for the plot at the entrance of the Adelphi, above the entrance to the underground roadways, Durham Hill. The underground road would have reduced the capacity for service rooms in the basement, so a church would have been an appropriate alternative to a house or shop on this site. Rowan notes that the church was designed without a patron in mind, and that it was probably a speculative design. This, coupled with the fact that James Adam managed to attract the Royal Society of Arts to the Adelphi meant that the plot was not used for a church, and the designs were unexecuted.
Level
Sir John Soane's collection includes some 30,000 architectural, design and topographical drawings which is a very important resource for scholars worldwide. His was the first architect’s collection to attempt to preserve the best in design for the architectural profession in the future, and it did so by assembling as exemplars surviving drawings by great Renaissance masters and by the leading architects in Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries and his near contemporaries such as Sir William Chambers, Robert Adam and George Dance the Younger. These drawings sit side by side with 9,000 drawings in Soane’s own hand or those of the pupils in his office, covering his early work as a student, his time in Italy and the drawings produced in the course of his architectural practice from 1780 until the 1830s.
Browse (via the vertical menu to the left) and search results for Drawings include a mixture of Concise catalogue records – drawn from an outline list of the collection – and fuller records where drawings have been catalogued in more detail (an ongoing process).
Contents of Durham Yard Church
- Preliminary designs, designs and finished drawing showing plans, elevations and sections for the building, c1769-76, unexecuted (7)
- Alternative finished drawing showing an elevation for the building, c1769-76, unexecuted (1)